I’ve always loved writing, but lately… I don’t know, I have found writing really hard and for the last year or so the blog has become more and more frustrating for me. I feel like I’ve moved beyond a touch of writer’s block to writer’s barricade the size of the Wall of Westeros and I’m just finding it increasingly difficult to work out what to write for this space of mine. I have so many words about the current #MeToo climate, Brexit, what’s for dinner next week – from the deep and meaningful to the quietly irrelevant but could be fun to read – I have the ideas, but when I come to type them, they flutter out of my noggin like the seeds of a dandelion that’s just been blown.
You might have noticed that I haven’t been writing with my usual Monday to Friday posts that hit at 6am, I haven’t been maintaining that schedule. I decided to give myself a new schedule of Mon/Wed/Fri with the understanding that I would be applying more of my time to my youtube but I haven’t been maintaining that either because, if I’m honest, I don’t really see my place on youtube, of what relevance is a woman who views most hauls as on a level with unboxing videos for children (unless they are disney hauls then I am ENGROSSED) and wouldn’t be able to speed clean if her life depended on it? Since I stopped applying myself to YouTube my views have collapsed and I’m even more ambivalent to it than before, what’s the point in spending two hours creating something if only a handful of people are watching it?
So where does that leave me?
Well I’m not really sure, I’m becoming more and more involved in Instagram than ever before and dedicating so much of myself and my time to it and to content creation for it that I just feel I’m slowly falling out of love with other platforms and the longer written posts on here.
Do you ever just feel like you have kind of done it all? I’ve written about a lot of the issues that are dear to my heart, I’ve never been the best foodie blogger as I tuck into most meals before I remember to photograph them (oops) and I’m not really into reviewing. I certainly don’t write “how to be a blogger or Instagrammer or whatever” posts as I think you have to have a certain amount of bollocks to believe that your way of doing it is so fundamentally the right way that you can class yourself an authority on it (though I am asked more or less every day, multiple times a day, to share my advice on how to become an instagrammer) and whilst I’ve clearly done what has worked for me, I don’t think it works for everyone. I’m also not a shade thrower, I prefer confetti, it’s prettier and less… twatty.
I am one of those writers that gets a feeling in my tummy, a fluttering and a simple need to get the content out there as fast as I can, my fingers often blur past across the keyboard and I have to re-read and edit myself repeatedly because the words have tumbled out too fast for me to hit the right keys. I guess you call that a passion led writer, yet here I am feeling little to no passion until I’m given an idea that fans the flames or challenges me creatively.
Am I going to stop blogging? Far from it, I’m really hoping to get back into the swing of posting daily, surely I owe it to myself to keep going after all of this hard work and whilst I adore Instagram, the content on there will never truly be exclusively mine. I guess I’m giving you an update and sharing the way that I’ve been feeling with regards to the blog lately. At the moment I think the 3 times a week post schedule is a better way for me to get back into blogging and writing more often, if only with the intention of being consistent and having you all stay with me on this journey.
H x
P.s – Oh, whilst I listed most of the things that aren’t my “ting” it appears that click bait is… sorry about the title, but you know, I really wanted to make my point that I’m finding writing hard at the moment and I’m not going anywhere but I am being a bit kinder to myself about not loving the keyboard as much.
Finding the strength to talk about it is a powerful act. It seems to me that you are experiencing the same thing as other people in other jobs. At some point, doubts begin about whether it is worth doing, how I do it and many other individual questions. I also had a bad emotional state and a psychologist helped me to get out of this problem. You know, he said that a person has a condition when he is 100% confident in his abilities and in what he is doing. That every person has experienced this condition many times. This state of in itself can be to inspire. Try reading about it. You should feel a lot better. Confidence will come!
Hi! Great soul cry, isn’t it?) You are right, now there are a lot of bloggers and writers and they are all different. One finds in the letter something. For some, it’s just a job or a way to earn money. Someone thinks about the letter day and night like a maniac. But it seems to me that some people are just created to write. I have a great friend and he always goes with his laptop or notebook. Almost 90% of the time I spent with him, he was always writing something. Or thinking about writing to him. He was already an Instagram blogger and an online writer. But the most important thing is that he is just crazy about his business. That’s cool!
Thank you for sharing your thoughts. You are a miracle!
I totally get you and have felt the same from time to time. When I get unwell more than usual I struggle to get anything out. I’m making a. Few changes too… not and never stopping but cutting back. Angela
I’ve really enjoyed reading your blog recently. I’m interested in the change from 1 kid to 2 & how to survive!! Really concerned about getting PND or something as I got down last time due to lack of sleep & boring long lonely days. If you’d like to blog about that I’d read it.
Plus as a teacher I always like hearing about parents view of schools and learning etc. Vlogs turn me off because I want to read sometimes when I’m on the couch or in bed etc. Either way I enjoy your posts & look forward to reading what comes next.
I know how you feel. I’ve never written as much or as frequently as you so it’s a totally different scale but I get the vibe. Until today I’d not posted on facebook for months and that’s where I get a lot of the local interaction. However, I’ve seen what a horrible place facebook has become and I just stopped engaging in it. Used to post my family photos there monthly for my granddad mainly but nope, haven’t done that since July either. It’s partly a time thing. I have a 3 days a week job and freelance stuff on top of that plus voluntary work and taxiing my kids to various clubs and whatnot every evening. And the blogging and instagramming just had to take a back seat.
I also get that “what have I got to say that no one else is saying already” thing. That pissing content away into the ether. The 40 likes AT THE VERY MOST and at least 6 of those are related to me. What’s the bloody point?!
I make myself come back to the USP shit I forced myself through when I was naming my blog and those gaps that I couldn’t see anyone else filling at the time. There were Cardiff parent bloggers but as much as I do engage with Cardiff, I don’t live there and the Vale is pretty cool in its own way. There was a lot of presumed middle-class stuff that made me twitch. Class is a weird one for me as education, career and interest wise people would presume I’m a certain kind of person but in real life we life in a very low income, high youth offending area, my husband does a manual job in hi-vis, we have very little money and I wasn’t seeing much from people in my price range in my area.
My kids are older too and I chose not to include their photos in the blogging & instagramming. It’s frustrating at times but I think it was the right decision for them. I’ve got a step child too and she respects that decision and it works for us. The no-face thing still applies to me though so it’s more about keeping it as anonymous as possible for as long as possible partly to keep my opinions separate from my work. But it all really cocks up which photos I can use and being able to fully reflect my parenting experience!
Plus my most liked posts seem to be food! Oh my main thing was to try and tell people about stuff that’s going on in the area, places to go etc but my Easter holidays project just fell flat on its arse engagement wise and it was really deflating. In hindsight I made some errors with scheduling but it took such a lot of time and didn’t have anywhere near the impact of some of my more off the cuff insta posts since.
World’s longest comment but just wanted to vent and say that I get it. I’ve always been a diarist so blogging felt like a fit for me.